“We discovered that it was OK to have a little high-brow as long you have a lot of low-brow. That’s entertainment value. The one thing you want to avoid is the middle brow, because the whole world is frigging middle brow at the moment.”
– Jon Langford

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Shop Till U.S. Drops

You can kill 3,000 of us. You can destroy a city's landmarks. You can give Bush & Co. an excuse to start a war they wanted to start anyway and thereby kill 1,700 more Americans and thousands of shocked and awed Iraqis.

While all eyes will be focused on the new design for the Freedom Tower, expected to be unveiled Wednesday, World Trade Center planners are looking beyond that troubled building and are laying plans for what they consider a key part of the site -- a big shopping complex.

Callison Architecture, a Seattle firm known for ambitious urban retail projects has created several options for squeezing 600,000 square feet of retail space throughout the site, mostly on underground concourses, train-station mezzanines, and in the base of the planned office buildings and hotel. Most of the shopping would be situated on the east side of the 16-acre site, across Greenwich Street from the footprints of the old towers, where the memorial and Freedom Tower will be.

[...]

Then there are the sightseers. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., a city-state agency guiding the rebuilding, estimates that five million visitors a year will stream to the World Trade Center memorial. Brookfield Properties Corp. is considering tapping into the retail demand by reconfiguring space in the World Financial Center, across the street from Ground Zero.

After all, if we buy something from this site of incomprehensible suffering and pain, we can thereby own it, and leave it in our closet and forget it and move on to some new television show. Plus, I can't wait for the tasteful sales on September 11 every year--our prices are falling like you wouldn't believe! It's our famous blow-out sale! Buy one, and the second's price collapses!

For there's nothing more American than a bumpersticker that reads "You Can't Get My Credit Card Till You Pry It from My Cold Dead Fingers." And that Freedom Tower will stand proud and tall as a symbol of our freedom of choice, between Banana Republic and J Crew.

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About Me

George markets only for the forces of good for a living. He has a paid hobby that involves eating, drinking, and writing, things he’d do for free, which is almost what he’s doing it for. In a previous life he taught mostly illiterate and generally ungrateful college students how to write. He has been a body guard for Jodie Foster, a walk-on dancer with French avant garde troupe Maguy Marin, a film programmer, a judge at an Iron Chef style competition, a political activist, a textbook author, a bassist in a band, a two-time league winning fantasy baseball manager, a union local president, a pr flack helping run a red carpet at an Angelina Jolie event, a janitor, a chauffeur to folks from TC Boyle to Andrei Codrescu, a delivery man to Plato's Retreat, a reluctant writer of a non-snarky intro for Colin Powell, a radio DJ, a corn detassler, an escort van driver, a rock journalist, a lab assistant for a company that made everything from mouthwash to super skin lubricant, and even, once, a poet. His biggest brush with fame was when Julie Christie fondled his tie, a tie George Lopez belittled to 1000 people minutes later. The best thing about him is his wife. His dogs aren't bad, either.